Khrustalyov, My Car! 1998

On the first day of a cold spring in 1953, two events mark the mood of a nation: Fireman Fedya Aramyshev, Aleksandr Bashirov, is arrested, and the ailing “Great Leader” Stalin is found lying on the floor of his dacha.

Earlier glimpses into the film pull us into the life of General Yuri Klensky, Yuriy Tsurilo, who serves in the military-medical service as the Doctors’ Plot fever swirls around a group of predominantly Jewish doctors accused of conspiring to kill Stalin. Klensky, himself Jewish, leans on heavy drinking in a desperate attempt to believe that Soviet justice might somehow overlook him, even as the surrounding crisis looms closer.

A chain of ominous signs nears: Klensky encounters his own double within the hospital, a moment that foreshadows the danger ahead, and a “foreigner” arrives at his home with news of a relative living abroad. Suspecting a provocation, Klensky shoves the stranger down the stairs, yet a local informant quickly relays the encounter to senior officers of the MGB, signaling that the net is tightening around him.

Klensky makes a failed escape, and the consequences are brutal. His family is uprooted, moved to a crowded communal apartment, and he himself is detained and handed over to criminals who beat and rape him. Then, almost miraculously, the bloodied general is transported from his cell to the countryside to attend to a high‑ranking patient. To his shock, the patient is Stalin, whose condition is dire and frightening. Beria’s voice is heard with chilling certainty as the moment signals the start of the post‑Stalin era: > “Khrustalyov, My Car!”

Released but forever changed, Klensky does not return to medicine. He steps away from the hospital and goes out into the people, finding a new role in the reckoning of a country in transition. In the film’s striking closing arc, he becomes the commandant of a moving train, drinking with a strange, buoyant joy as he balances a glass of port on his shaved head, a visual reminder of how far he has traveled from the sterile corridors of power to the raw, unpredictable path of life on the rails.

The narrative paints a tense, darkly surreal portrait of loyalty, fear, and resilience in a collapsing system, anchored by the performances that bring to life a moment when power trembles—and a man must decide what it means to endure.